"For through our lively traffic all the day, In my own person I am forced to know How much must be forgotten out of love, How much must be forgiven, even love." - W.H. Auden^[1]

Adrienne, I am growing tomatoes, the last of them, before winter ellipses all warmth from the days. And in their shade, along with the earthworm, a burrowing silence drills and drills.

I know this enthusiasm for earth, and its vegetal matter we - a framer's grandson and a musician's daughter - don't share. But love for me is an extension of this hard labor, the weight of which I carry for joy, a sowing, and its delayed reaping, if weathers permit.

I bend over the green stems with their fumy smells as I grow colder at the edges, a haunting like the blackness of an icon's eye. What music did I expect to give you, one who can play Bach blindfolded; arias in airy cathedrals when all I know how to do is chop wood?

But if I manage to keep my sanity and these tomatoes from pestilence, when this season is done and bones of this world are embraced by ice, come by for some stew and silence. And in the shadows of fires we can try to remember those memories we will have forgotten out of love.

for N

[1] from Auden's "Canzone"